I have a few Thundercats animation cels and have located the episodes that most of them appear in (through hours and hours of television research). I would like to get screen captures from the exact moments in the episode that my cels appear. I have all of the Thundercat DVDs and a a DVD drive on my desktop. My question for the forum is:
Can anyone point me toward a free/cheap method of doing a screen capture? I don’t know anything about video editing. Is there some free/cheap software out there that I can get my hands on?
Thanks in advance.
Update:
In case anyone in the future needs to know how to do this:
I’ve had some luck using a combination of (trial version) softwares: Media Player Classic and SnagIt.
After downloading and installing WPC go to View > Options > Playback > Output and set the DirectShow Video toggle to something other than “Overlay Mixer”. I put mine to VMR7. Now start your (Thundercats) DVD. There’s a handy step through by frame button at the right on the bottom toolbar to help you find the exact frame you are looking for (but don’t go too far because there isn’t a step BACK through button).
Once I had found the frame I enlarged the screen to full screen, then did a full screen capture with SnagIt. SnagIt will prompt you for details of what file type and where to store the picture. I used some photo editing software (Google Picasa is always a nice tool for this) to trim away the black around the edges and I was done.
Notes: You don’t have to use SnagIt if you don’t want to. WPC has an automatic screen capture tool (press Alt + I), though the image saved is smaller than possible when using the method I described above.
Also, the limited amount of research I’ve done into this has told me that you cannot use newer versions of Windows Media Player (versions 10 and up) to play the DVD. Capturing an image this way from WMP10+ results in a black screen being saved. However, there are a couple of tricks you can do to doctor your older versions of WMP so that you can get screen captures from them. You can look up that information on another chat board.